Christa Romanosky writes of her Appalachian youth

Fine Arts Work Center writing fellow Christa Romanosky comes from an area outside of Waynesburg, Pa., a coal mining region bordering West Virginia, which it resembles more than her own state.

“It’s extremely rural,” she says. “Most of the people had jobs at the mines, and now the mines are closing. We had a farm with calves and chickens and horses at one point. And geese [who were hand-raised] — they were very sweet.”

In one picture, Romanosky, about 10 years old, holds a pet goose — she’s an all-American farm girl with a big grin. She didn’t eat a chicken egg until she was seven, she says. They lived on what they had — goose and duck eggs.

“They taste a little different, not too bad,” she says.

To get anywhere from that farm is a 20- to 25-minute drive. Whenever a coffee shop opens in the area, it quickly shutters, Romanosky says, because the unemployed won’t pay for coffee. Now the fracking companies have moved in and further disrupted life.

“We used to have well water growing up, and now the water is poison, so we have to pipe it in and it’s expensive,” she says. Back then it was “pitch black” at night. Now it’s bright and constantly noisy from fracking activity.

The linked short story collection that she’s working on deals with these changes.

“I’m trying to infuse that into the newer ones I’m working on — the collapse of everything,” Romanosky says.

She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia and is a 2016 recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant for fiction that focuses on rural female experiences. Her writing has appeared in many literary magazines. And at 6:30 p.m. on Saturday at the work center in Provincetown, Romanosky will be reading from some of her recent work.

Her stories are often told from the perspective of young people, who, she says, are thinking, feeling humans, doing things that aren’t necessarily wise. Teenagers interest her, because “something that can seem so innocent as a child can feel so brutal as an adult,” she says. “Or vice versa.”

This is apparent in her short story “Things That Scatter When the Light Hits”: “Before you meet him, you are already getting into cars with strangers and hoping you come out the other side. You are smoking cigarettes down to your thumbs and chewing spearmint gum you’ve bummed from men you met at Pins & Needles Bowling Alley, the VFW bar. ‘Man of my dreams,’ you say to Amber Ringer each time you see a roughneck at the carwash, at the county fair, but you never go further than that. … When you meet Mack, who is much older, wears a leather jacket, eyes dark as black coffee, is a businessman, a gambler, a smooth talker, he puts one hand on your neck and whispers, ‘I choose you.’ It’s easy to sneak out, to momentarily escape. When he kisses you, you see the cosmos, the universe, some blank space suddenly filled with particles of light, with waves so far into the horizon it is impossible to know what they take the shape of.”

Romanosky pleads the fifth when asked about her experience with older men, who appear in more than one story. She’s about halfway through the manuscript, in which characters reappear throughout. Though she hasn’t thought about the timeline yet, when she does, she will approach it the same way she does collections of her poetry — by spreading the pieces out on the floor and seeing what looks right where.

“I write stories the way my mother cleans,” she says, meaning that she starts by taking everything out. “I make a lot of messes before I know what I’m writing about.”

Romanosky may or may not be joking when she says that she lost a lot of friends when she volunteered for — and then took a job at — an animal shelter as a teenager, because she made so many people adopt pets.

She writes about the shelter in “Things that Scatter”: “The worst thing about your job is the euthanasia. Each Friday, you lift unadoptable dogs onto a tall metal table, hold their collars, soothe them while the vet administers two separate injections. This week, it’s the old poodle with no teeth, an aggressive chow, an old black lab. You think about how these dogs, once alive and loved, are now simply discarded, dismantled, flushed. How the last thing they see is the basement of a shelter that reeks of bleach and feces and dirty blankets and mold. And yet they trust you. The first injection makes them fall asleep — the second stops their breathing. Then you and the vet slip the bodies into doubled plastic trash bags, tie tag them, wheel everything to the dumpster using a donated child-sized red wagon. … In the bathroom of the animal shelter, you sit at the edge of the tub and cry. All around you is black fur. When you arrive home several hours later, the fur still clings to you like light refusing to leave at dusk.”

In real life, Romanosky says, the shelter was actually more harrowing than in it is in the story. It had to be moved across the street into a crooked house, because the coal mine built underneath it collapsed its foundation. And yet her thoughts return to that place and that time, and the farm on which she was raised. She’s got a cat here with her in Provincetown. Plants line her apartment window, with the bay visible behind them. Though she finds the place “really beautiful,” she’d be lost without her plants, which she calls “a little to-go pack of farm-age.”

Original content available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license, except where noted.
Wicked Local Provincetown ~ P.O. Box 977 Provincetown, MA 02657 ~ Privacy Policy ~ Terms Of Service